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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Explore a Futuristic Kowloon Walled City as a Cat?!

After reading Jim Butcher's latest book, The Aeronaut's Windlass, I found myself confused by some of the public book reviews. I saw many references to "giant talking cats" popping up from time to time. It's true there are cats in the book. It is also true, to a certain extent, that they talk. The thing is, they aren't "giant" cats and they don't "talk" in any way that is particularly fantastic. In Butcher's book, the "fantastic" thing isn't that cats can talk, rather the fantasy element is that some humans can speak cat. In our own "non-fantastic" world, grown cats only seem to meow in order to communicate with humans. They will, in fact, modify their meows to create a subtle cat to human interactions that simulate language, but we humans seem to be pretty dim when it comes to understanding what cats are trying to say. Some of us are, that is.

What really impressed me was Butcher's ability to write about cats without overly anthropomorphizing them, though there are Warrior Born who go a little in that direction. He was so successful in his writing that he created an interest I didn't know I had, an interest in playing a cat based adventure game on the computer or console. It looks like game designers Koola and Viv are working on a project that will perfectly scratch this its. They are working on a third-person adventure game where you play as a cat exploring a terrain based on Kowloon Walled City. I don't think I could ask for more.